I have a bunch of those point and click adventure games from the 90's (my youth) like Pajama Sam, Putt-Putt and Spy Fox. These CDs are becoming old and scratched. Being that these were such a memorable part of my childhood, I am looking for a way to back them up for my future kids, grandkids, etc. Where can I get started? Is there anything I should know, need to download, etc?

Plus now I don't get to hear all the old cronies complain about how they've had to migrate the storage media for their punch card code 5 times now
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Code BlingMay 24 '11 at 22:07

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I can see a deck of punch cards from where I'm sitting right now. I don't have a card reader, though. I do have a (still bootable) PDP-11 in the other room, along with boxes of 8" floppies and 9-track tape reels... ;-) and I've written code to run in Windows 2.0, but we migrated to 3.0 before the project was done.
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RBerteigMay 25 '11 at 0:37

Another problem from that era could be 16 bit executables (especially installers) which won't run on modern 64 bit Windows systems. Also, what about DRM? Some image utilities may be able to create good enough images, but make sure that you test them before dumping the original disk.
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AndrejaKoMay 24 '11 at 23:28

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DaemonTools Lite cam emulate all cd protection systems. (filehippo.com/download_daemon_tools ). There is a full version, but I've never needed it, and the lite is good enough. I pretty much don't use CDs anymore. I just rip discs to .ISO or .Bin+.Cue, and use a virtual drive.
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Fake NameMay 25 '11 at 4:28

In my opinion, the easiest way would be to save the CDs as ISOs; this way you'd have a perfect copy of the CDs and you'd be able to save them anywhere you'd like. Given the fact that the games you want to save aren't that new, the size of the ISOs would be relatively small, so storage would not be an issue.

Here's an article explaining how you can save a CD as an ISO image (there are probably other ways to do it).